Feeling Behind in Life? Set Realistic Goals to Thrive

That persistent, nagging thought that you’re falling behind can be overwhelming. You scroll through social media or look at competitors and feel a pit in your stomach. This feeling behind in life is especially common for people trying to build something new, like founders and leaders.

You pour your time, energy, and resources into your ideas and your vision for the future. Yet, the desired results fail to appear on the timeline you carefully planned. This frustration can lead to serious self-doubt and make you question your entire path.

But what if that feeling of being left behind is not a warning sign of failure? What if it’s actually a map, guiding you through difficult terrain and confirming you’re on the right track to somewhere extraordinary?

Table Of Contents:The Deceptive Comfort of the “Normal” PathWhy Your Progress Feels Invisible (And Why That’s a Good Thing)The Truth About Your Feeling Behind in LifeThe Gap vs. Your CapabilityCertainty Is the Real TrapThe Different Math of Long-Term SuccessConclusionThe Deceptive Comfort of the “Normal” Path

Imagine a turkey, fed generously every single day for a thousand days by a seemingly friendly butcher. From the turkey’s limited perspective, the evidence is solid and overwhelmingly positive. Each day improves upon the last, and the trend points toward a future of continued comfort and care.

Then, day 1,001 arrives. It’s Thanksgiving. In a single, shocking moment, the turkey’s entire understanding of the world collapses catastrophically. This idea, famously explored in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work on Black Swan events, shows how predictable systems can contain hidden, fatal risks.

Society often promotes a “turkey” path for professional life. Attend a good school, secure a steady job, and patiently climb the corporate ladder. For a time, this route appears reliable and secure, offering predictable raises and a clear hierarchy. But this path often trades massive potential for simple predictability.

It is a system built for standardization and averages, not for breakthrough success or profound personal growth. Following this script can feel safe, but it limits your exposure to the kind of opportunities that create immense value. The perceived safety is an illusion that hides the risk of obsolescence or sudden disruption.

Why Your Progress Feels Invisible (And Why That’s a Good Thing)

When you are playing an exponential game, you are supposed to look like you’re losing for a long time. This is not a defect in your strategy; it is the fundamental nature of how compounding works. Your skills, knowledge, and systems are all growing invisibly long before they produce any visible results.

Think about the growth of bamboo. For years, it shows almost no growth above the surface, focusing its energy on building a complex root system underground. Then, when the foundation is ready, it can shoot up dozens of feet in just a few weeks. Your early efforts are that root system, completely hidden from view but absolutely essential for the explosive growth to come.

Can you physically feel yourself getting smarter or more intuitive? The person you are today solves problems that would have completely stumped the you of a year ago. That growth is entirely transparent to you because it happens incrementally.

This is precisely where most people abandon their ambitions. They search for linear validation in an exponential world, a confirmation that their effort today will yield a proportional reward tomorrow. They mistake the quiet, flat part of the growth curve for failure, never realizing they are assembling the foundation for a vertical launch.

The Truth About Your Feeling Behind in Life

The anxiety that accompanies an unknown future can be crippling for most people. They crave a clear roadmap and a guaranteed outcome for their efforts. This leads them to trade huge potential for the simple comfort of predictability and a steady paycheck.

For innovators, founders, and creators, the opposite mindset is required. A deep sense of discomfort with certainty should be your guide. If the path ahead feels too safe and well-defined, it probably means you’re just rebuilding something that already exists, not creating something truly new.

This feeling of unease is a powerful signal. It is an indicator that you are pushing into uncharted territory where real innovation occurs. This productive discomfort is entirely different from the suffering that comes from avoiding problems; it shows you are engaging with reality and building resilience.

The Gap vs. Your Capability

We often measure our progress by looking at the gap between where we are and where we want to be. This is a common mental trap. The gap itself might not shrink for a while, or it might even grow, which makes you feel like you are not moving at all.

Here is the insight that can change everything. Stop measuring the gap and start focusing on your capability to close it. The gap might not shrink in a straight line, but your capability to address it can grow exponentially. You might be in the same apparent position as last year, but you are not the same person.

You are building a rocket while almost everyone else is jogging. They are making steady, visible progress on their path, but you are still on the ground assembling your launchpad and engineering your propulsion systems. From an outside perspective, you look like you’re hopelessly behind, but you’re preparing for a journey they can’t even imagine.

Your growing capability includes new skills, a stronger network, a deeper understanding of the market, and increased resilience from past failures. These assets are hard to quantify day-to-day, but they are what will ultimately propel you forward. A great way to recognize this growth is to periodically reflect on problems you can solve today that were impossible for you a year or two ago.

Certainty Is the Real Trap

If you knew exactly how your ambitious project would turn out, it probably would not be very ambitious in the first place. The most significant human achievements are born from navigating the unknown and solving problems without a clear answer key. According to research mentioned in an article from Psychology Today, a high tolerance for ambiguity is a hallmark of creative and innovative thinkers.

When you feel the weight of uncertainty, do not run from it. Lean into that feeling. This is the space where you ask better questions, discover new patterns, and ultimately build things that no one has ever seen before. Your discomfort is not a sign of personal failure; it’s a compass pointing directly toward genuine innovation.

This state of not knowing forces you to be more resourceful and adaptable. Certainty makes people complacent and rigid in their thinking. Uncertainty, on the other hand, keeps you alert and open to new information, which is a massive competitive advantage.

The Different Math of Long-Term Success

People who follow traditional paths are playing a game of simple addition. They work for a set number of hours and receive a set amount of pay in return. Their career and income growth is mostly linear: 1+1+1+1 equals 4.

But as a founder or creator, you are playing a game of multiplication. Your efforts are meant to compound over time. This kind of exponential growth, like 1.1 multiplied by itself over and over, quickly outpaces linear addition. A small amount of progress each day builds into something enormous over a year or more.

The real magic happens when your different systems begin to interact with one another. Your growing network improves the quality of your ideas. Your refined ideas improve your products or services. Your improved products bring in new customers and opportunities, which in turn expands your network.

This is emergent growth, where 1+1 can equal 3, 5, or even 10. You are not just compounding a single variable like money in a bank account. You are compounding entire systems of skills, relationships, and assets.

This table helps show the different mindsets:

AspectLinear PathExponential PathGoalPredictability and StabilityAsymmetric Upside and ImpactFeedbackSlow and BufferedConstant and ImmediateRiskHidden, Catastrophic (Turkey Problem)Open, Small, and FrequentView of TimeA resource to be tradedA medium for compoundingFeeling of ProgressSteady and ConstantStagnant, then Suddenly massiveHandling SetbacksAn obstacle to avoidData for iteration and improvement.Primary AssetYears of experienceGrowing capability & adaptabilityConclusion

The journey of a founder, a leader, or a creator is not supposed to feel easy or predictable. The discomfort, the deep mental health uncertainty, and the persistent sense of not being there yet are all integral parts of the process. That constant feeling behind in life is not a symptom of your failure; it is the price of admission for playing a much bigger game.

You are not the same person who started this difficult journey. The gap between you and your ultimate goal may look the same on the surface, but your capacity to cross it has grown beyond what you can easily see. This invisible progress is your most valuable asset.

Trust the process, stay in the game, and learn to reframe your perspective. You need to understand that looking like you are losing is often what winning feels like in the early stages of an exponential curve. Your time will come, fueled by the very foundation you are building today with your mental health in the quiet and the dark.

Scale growth with AI! Get my bestselling book, Lean AI, today!

The post Feeling Behind in Life? Set Realistic Goals to Thrive appeared first on Lomit Patel.